Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
When we arrived at Aunt Vera’s house, I was relieved to find the driveway empty.
She and Bryce were on their scheduled Sunday-night date.
I used my key and entered then gasped as I looked around.
Vases of flowers covered nearly every surface—lilacs and bluebells, asters and zinnias.
When my aunt had run out of vases, she turned to more creative flower holders, and daisies and poppies were bursting out of teacups, mason jars, and soup cans.
“Let’s get started,” I said, going straight to the two small bookshelves in the living room.
I scanned the titles while Callan thumbed through the books on the adjacent shelf, but there was nothing unusual.
It was a mix of my aunt’s cooking and baking books, entrepreneurial self-help titles, a few romance novels, and some other nonfiction books that I assumed belonged to Bryce.
“Any luck?” I asked.
Callan shook his head and scanned the room.
With a little sigh of consternation, I considered where else in the house they might keep books. “Let’s check the office.”
We went down the hall, and as soon as we entered the office, I zeroed in on a pile of wedding leftovers in the corner. My aunt had stashed wedding décor and gifts that she still needed to deal with into a few bins.
“This is all wedding stuff,” I said. “Maybe we’ll find something here.”
I knelt on the carpet and began to sift. In the second bin, after I’d moved aside a brand-new set of sheets, my fingers skimmed an old leather-bound book, and a familiar warmth passed through me. My heart racing, I picked it up and nearly jumped as warmth continued to pool in my hands.
I tipped open the cover and found that the book was filled with botanical illustrations. “Callan,” I breathed.
“I see it,” he said, abandoning the bin he had been searching.
My pulse was so high that I had trouble hearing my thoughts. We had suspected Alex, but confirmation that my aunt had a book belonging to da Vinci hit me like a sack of potatoes to the gut.
Automatically, I moved to the notebook on the desk. “My aunt kept a list of the gifts she received and who they were from.”
I anxiously skimmed down the paper—still holding out a tiny sliver of hope—until I saw an item titled Vintage coffee table art book.
With bated breath, I checked the other side of the column, where the names were scrawled.
The name jumped out at me as if its font were larger than the others.
I had seen it written hundreds of times and knew it nearly as well as my own.
Maci Phouthavong.
My breath released from my chest in one big whoosh. I’d known it was coming, but this was confirmation. Alex had slipped the book into the gift from Maci, like a devious little weed.
I went back to the wedding bins, where the cards for my aunt and Bryce were preserved on a large metal loop, and carefully sorted through them until I found the one I was looking for.